The infrastructure of higher education is remarkable. Over the years I have been astonished to learn how many formal organizations there are that network specialists of one sort or another in university administration. And of course there are at least as many informal networks. One of them is a group that calls itself “Ivy Plus,” a multiple network of administrators in the Ivy League, MIT and Stanford.
In September I am addressing the Ivy Plus session for development officers. On Tuesday I spoke to the Ivy Plus alumni-relations specialists. The theme of their meeting was “tradition and modernity,” and they asked this question: “How do our institutions preserve and perpetuate the best of our pasts, while still remaining flexible and agile enough to respond to changing circumstances and maintain our positions of leadership?”
I thought it was a good question, especially since it is easy for the faculty to dismiss alumni relations as little more than the soft side of university fund raising — if we can bring the alums back to campus annually to drink and wear funny costumes, perhaps they will be more generous in their annual giving. And there is no doubt that is a key purpose of investing in alumni-relations programs. But I was impressed by the seriousness of the group, and by their concern to understand which of their traditions are genuinely worth preserving. One of their break-out sessions was entitled “How Do You Know When it’s Got to Go?” and that struck me as a very good question to ask. (But I confess that I left after my own talk and before this session.)
I suppose that universities are constantly engaged in a process of inventing tradition. After all, this is one reason why so many colleges and other institutions of higher learning have recently relabeled themselves as “universities.” This puts them instantly into a tradition they can market to students (and others). But of course the Ivy Plus institutions (apart from Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, and Stanford) have genuinely old traditions as colonial colleges. But they did not become universities until the late 19th century or later. And even then they were engaged in reimagining themselves — Harvard and Yale established Oxbridge-wannabe residential college systems in the 1920s and 1930s, just at the time they were actually becoming more like Humboldtian-German universities in actuality. And Princeton did not attempt a similar move until 1982. Instant traditions, and good ones for collegiate education.
My argument to the Ivy Plus group was that if their institutions truly wanted to preserve the tradition that best characterized the historic mission of the Ivies, they ought to focus on the primacy of undergraduate education — on the college within that generated the modern university. That is of course a message that would resonate with alumni, since the core of any institution’s alumni is its former undergraduate students. But, alas, this is a tradition that I doubt we can sell to presidents, trustees, and faculty. When it comes to undergraduate education, it may be that modernity has already triumphed over tradition — that the university has swallowed up the college.
